Mexican diplomat: Immigration reform will be a very important step

Mexico's new consul general in Chicago said Monday that U.S. immigration reform is possible as a result of the new vision imposed by globalization, but he warned that, as in any negotiation, "nobody's going to win everything."

"I think that it will be a very important step for undocumented immigrants in all countries, and if not exactly everything that the law requires is achieved, the rest will be the issue of a new struggle," Carlos Martin Jimenez Macias said in an interview with Efe.

Jimenez, 62, is a veteran politician who as a 16-year-old experienced what it was like to live as an undocumented immigrant in Chicago, where he lived with his two brothers.

"They deported me after working for a year in a factory and in landscaping and I have an experience that marked me greatly," he said.

His brothers remained in the United States and now live in Texas and Washington state.

Jimenez said that immigration is a phenomenon resulting from globalization and that "it's absurd" for governments of powerful countries not to recognize it.

"They benefit from the labor of the immigrants but they're not ready to recognize their rights," he said.

Jimenez, a former lawmaker, now represents Mexico in the world's second-largest "Mexican" city outside the Aztec nation.

Los Angeles is No. 1.

Jimenez will immediately have to deal with the fact that the consulate in Chicago is swamped with paperwork - that is, processing documents for Mexican citizens - and is facing "a very high risk of collapse."

"It would be a terrible frustration if we could not attend to the people well after the expectations raised by immigration reform, and ... by the expediting of driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants," he said regarding the law that will benefit some 250,000 people in Illinois starting in October.

The Chicago consulate has jurisdiction in Illinois, southern Wisconsin and northern Indiana, where some three million Mexicans live. EFE